https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00344-8
Regular Article
Time-varying graph representation learning via higher-order skip-gram with negative sampling
1
Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
2
ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
3
CENTAI, Turin, Italy
Received:
11
June
2021
Accepted:
9
May
2022
Published online:
28
May
2022
Representation learning models for graphs are a successful family of techniques that project nodes into feature spaces that can be exploited by other machine learning algorithms. Since many real-world networks are inherently dynamic, with interactions among nodes changing over time, these techniques can be defined both for static and for time-varying graphs. Here, we show how the skip-gram embedding approach can be generalized to perform implicit tensor factorization on different tensor representations of time-varying graphs. We show that higher-order skip-gram with negative sampling (HOSGNS) is able to disentangle the role of nodes and time, with a small fraction of the number of parameters needed by other approaches. We empirically evaluate our approach using time-resolved face-to-face proximity data, showing that the learned representations outperform state-of-the-art methods when used to solve downstream tasks such as network reconstruction. Good performance on predicting the outcome of dynamical processes such as disease spreading shows the potential of this method to estimate contagion risk, providing early risk awareness based on contact tracing data.
Key words: Representation learning / Time-varying graphs / Spreading processes / Temporal link prediction
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00344-8.
© The Author(s) 2022
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